A Madisonville-area firefighter allegedly used his fire-district fuel card to pay for about $2,600 worth of gas for his personal vehicles over the course of a year.

St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's OfficeCarl Hinton

Carl Hinton, a three-year veteran of the department, was fired after an internal investigation revealed he had been using several fuel cards from St. Tammany Parish's 2nd Fire Protection District during a 13-month period, Chief Michael Stein said this week.

Hinton was able to get away with the scam for so long because officials with the district had not been carefully reviewing the charges on the cards, which are supposed to be used only to keep department vehicles fueled up. Since the alleged fraud was discovered, additional measures have been put in place to monitor the use of the cards.

"This is our fault, we didn't catch it," Stein said. "We're definitely on top of it now."

Stein said he began investigating the use of the fire district's fuel cards last winter, after noticing charges for gas well outside the area covered by the district. Some of those charges were made as far away as Slidell and Pearl River and a later review showed that, in some cases, several suspicious fuel charges were racked up on the same day, he said.

The alleged fraud was noted in an audit of the department released this week.

After noticing the problematic charges, Stein went to several of the gas stations where they had been made and asked to see surveillance video taken during the fueling. From these videos, he was able to narrow in on the 23-year-old Hinton.

The investigation was somewhat complicated by the fact that Hinton allegedly used PIN numbers assigned to other members of the department when he made some of the charges and used several different cards while he was allegedly running the scam. Each of the department's vehicles has its own card, which is supposed to be kept inside that vehicle. While Hinton apparently removed the card to buy his own gas, Stein said the cards had always been in their proper place when officials made periodic checks on them.

The other firefighters whose pin numbers were used by Hinton have since been cleared of making any inappropriate charges, Stein said.

Once Stein completed his investigation, Hinton was put on paid leave while the department's Civil Service Board considered his case. The administrative hearings, during which Hinton confessed to using the cards inappropriately, took about three months and he was fired in February.

The Fire District has recouped some of the costs Hinton racked up by withholding about $1,400 he should have received for unused vacation time, Stein said. Both the pay-out for the unused vacation time and the paid leave Hinton received during his hearings are standard policies of the district's Civil Service Board, he said.

Stein said the rest of the money Hinton allegedly took from the department will likely come from court-ordered restitution.

During the administrative hearings, Hinton told Fire District officials that he had used the department's cards because he had a gambling problem.

Stein said Hinton, of Slidell, had been a good firefighter and no one had known he was facing any sort of monetary problems.

"I'm really surprised and just wonder why would anybody do that," Stein said.

Hinton was arrested after his firing and booked into the St. Tammany Parish jail with unauthorized use of an access card, a felony. He is currently awaiting trial.

Stein said that, in the wake of the alleged fraud, he has tried to ensure that fuel purchases are more thoroughly reviewed. Both he and the district's bookkeeper now look through each charge, a level of scrutiny that had not been in place last year.

Stein said the alleged fraud was an uncommon issue for the 28-member department but worried that as the agency grows to keep up with development in the Madisonville area it will have to deal with more issues with its employees.

"We've always been a quiet department, a good little department," he said. "We're trying to keep it that way but we're going to run into some of these problems because we're a growing department."